Africa's Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World

Ten years into the continent's quiet revolution, lessons for the developing world

A construction worker walks on scaffolding on a tunnel project under construction near the Kenyan capital, Nairobi / Reuters

The poverty mafia once controlled the development debate in
Africa. No longer.

The old approach was about how to prevent Africa from
getting poorer. All development goals were essentially negative, as experts
wallowed in risk-aversion and promoted various doomsday scenarios of an Africa
with a rapidly growing population.

The new thinking on development is to share Africa's wealth
more equitably. That's right: Africa's wealth.

In 2000, when I first visited Sub-Saharan Africa, to report
on the civil war in Burundi, the international community was preparing itself for
a new round of development failures. Wealth was a dirty word. The influential economist
Paul Collier even suggested that African countries were better off poor because
wealth -- especially resources that could be sold on international markets --
inevitably fueled civil wars.

Yet at that same moment when leading development thinkers
saw the most modest of futures for the sub-Saharan as a region, a diverse group
of determined African technocrats -- from Ghana to Uganda, Zambia to Kenya,
South Africa to Rwanda -- joined forces with technologically savvy, globally oriented
capitalists to launch a quiet revolution in development thinking. In time,
their changes helped lead to Africa's dramatically improved economic
performance, and greater confidence in their ideas.

The economic evidence that they were right, building since
the start of the new century, now seems incontrovertible. In the ten years from
2000 to 2010, six of the world's ten fastest-growing countries were in
sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique, and Rwanda. In
eight of the past ten years, sub-Saharan Africa has grown faster than Asia,
according to The Economist. In 2012,
the International Monetary Fund expects Africa to grow at a rate of 6%, about
the same as Asia.

Ten years ago, development was synonymous with
disappointment for Africa watchers, to paraphrase the chapter in Frederick
Cooper's classic survey, "Africa Since 1940." The decades following de-colonization
in the late 1950s and early 1960s saw metrics in economics, health, and
well-being decline almost across the board. Writing in 2002, Cooper observed,
"No word captures the hopes and ambitions of African leaders, its educated
populations and many of its farmers and workers ... better than development." Yet
"development and disappointment," Cooper concluded, went hand in hand as the development
strategies of African governments, and the foreign-assistance strategies of the
international community, proved ineffective and, to some critics, even retarded
African development.

What changed? Partly, the boom in commodities. Sky-high
copper prices have lifted copper-rich Zambia. Record cocoa prices are bringing
$2 billion annually into Ghana. Kenyan farmers, mostly small, are responsible
for $1 billion in annual exports of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, a figure
that dwarfs the country's traditional coffee and tea exports. And, of course, high
demand for oil and gas has helped a number of countries enormously. But even
countries without such natural resources, such as Rwanda, have seen significant
gains, mostly because of improved economic governance and the return of money
and skills from Africans who left their countries during the dog days. Rwanda,
for instance, long an importer of food, now grows enough to satisfying the
needs of its people, and even exports cash crops such as coffee for the first
time.

Technology also plays an important part in the new African
boom. Probably the most astonishing development success since 2000 in Africa
has been the communications revolution. A dozen years ago, merely making a
phone call (or receiving one) was virtually impossible even in Africa's most
important commercial centers. An elite business person might hire two or three
people fulltime simply to repeatedly dial phone numbers over the crumbling,
puny, and perversely sub-optimal government-owned telephone systems. Nigeria, at
the time a country of 100 million people, had at most 100,000 working dial
tones. It was not remarkable for one call out of every 50 made to be completed.
Naturally, the effect on productivity was devastating, but equally as bad was
the sense of isolation. Everything had to be done face to face, consigning
people to long trips for even trivial maneuvers. Waiting became a way of life.

No longer. The advent
of mobile telephones has brought instant communications to hundreds of millions
of Africans, rich and poor, urban and rural. Africans are now on the move. Text
messaging and digital money-transfer services, such as Safaricom's M-pesa in
Kenya, have transformed ordinary life. Yet this most visible of all African
advances, this gigantic step forward in linking Africans to each other and to
people around the world, occurred with virtually zero assistance from the
professional development community of donors and economists, aid workers and
development agencies. Uniformly, these "experts" said Africans were simply too
poor to benefit from mobile telecommunications, so they provided scant
assistance in the 1990s and early 2000s when African governments, in the main,
relaxed their long hegemony over telecommunications and permitted private
companies to lead the push into mobile phones.

Some Africans have made fortunes. The Sudanese engineer Mo
Ibrahim even became a billionaire from piecing together a regional network of
mobile companies. In virtually every single African nation, the leading mobile
phone company is now the leading taxpayer to the government, the leading local
donor to local causes, and one of the leading employers.

But more important than the economic impact of the mobile
revolution was the mental impact. The twin values of self-reliance and exceeding
expectations were cemented by the success in mobile telephony, which compelled
development experts to rethink their commitment to African under-development.

The striking improvements in living standards in Africa,
especially for small farmers, have triggered a new optimism about the prospects
for the continent. While gloomy "Afro-pessimists" still dominate the global
debate, more optimistic and pragmatic voices are starting to challenge old
orthodoxies. "Policies devised by governments and donors imply a daunting lack
of ambition," declared a 2010 report from the London-based Africa Research
Institute. While the report is specifically about "why Africa can make it big
in agriculture," the same observation -- that international development experts
inexplicably downplay African prospects -- could be made across industries.

Even African nationalists missed the turn towards more
expansive development aims. Damiso Moyo, a Zambian economist working in London,
was so intent on bashing the wrong-headedness of Western economic advisers in
her 2010 polemic Dead Aid that she
failed to notice the rise of an indigenous capitalist class across the Sub-Saharan.
Moyo also insisted that China, whose economic influence in the region rose from
almost nothing ten years ago, should provide a development model for Africa
because its own internal resources could not sustain growth.

Expectations are radically different now. A decade ago, The Economist labeled Africa "the
hopeless continent." In December, the magazine predicted that "the continent's impressive
growth looks likely to continue." Apologizing for their former Afro-pessimism,
the editors now conclude
"a profound change has taken hold" in the region.

The conversation about development, still too often mired in
outmoded discussions of African poverty and stagnation, must catch up to the
realities on the ground. A decade ago, development experts lectured African
governments on the importance of crafting pro-poor policies. Now the question increasingly asked is how
Africans can share their wealth more equitably. Inequality in sub-Saharan is
rising even as, in most countries, the basic standard is also rising. In a
lengthy essay of my own on African inequality, published in 2010 by the Milken
Institute Review of Economic Policy, I cited the work of Xavier Sala-i-Martin,
an economist at Columbia University who found ample evidence for "exploding"
wealth inequality in the region.

Other development challenges remain. While women and
children are faring much better in the region, on balance, than they were a
generation ago. The need for more improvement is still urgent. Public health
also lags economic growth. So too do gains in human rights and effective government.
Finally, a surge in anti-gay attitudes and actions highlight the problem that
newfound prosperity can fuel prejudice.

These development "deficits" raise persistent doubts about
how far market-oriented policies can take African societies. In the next wave
of creative thinking about development, the nation-state must return as a
subject of conversation. African states need to take a stronger role in
promoting general welfare even as they cannot return to the practices of the
past that stifled individual initiative, robbed "surplus capital" from the
enterprising, and reinforced social inequality, consigning women and children
to the worst forms of abuse. Only strong nation-states, committed to fairness,
can manage the new tensions brought on by wealth and insure that the old
risk-averse agenda of African development -- obsessing over preventing further
slippage into poverty rather than nakedly pursuing legitimate achievable gains --
becomes an artifact of history.

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